If there are obstacles, there are always people ready to figure out how to overcome them, and while the software industry is now a huge multi-billion-dollar market that employs thousands of designers, developers and coders, it’s also become a victim of this same underground culture. The philosophy is generally that big companies can afford to not have everyone pay to get the software because they’re already rich, and what harm can one or two people sidestepping payment and licensing fees do anyway?
The problem with this sort of thinking is immediately obvious, of course: big companies hire people and those people get paid based on the revenue generated from the software sales, whether it’s Call of Duty or Microsoft Word. To complain that software’s expensive is different, but that’s a market economics question and when a game costs $80 or a utility $250, that’s because the company has ascertained that’s the appropriate value. If they miss on that estimate, no-one buys it and they lower the price.
And there are a remarkable number of really good shareware and freeware alternatives too, so if you really need Adobe Photoshop but can’t afford the subscription fee, check out GIMP from the Free Software Foundation. Microsoft Office too expensive? Try Google Docs instead, and bonus, Google Docs is Web-based so it won’t eat up disk space on your system either.
The alternative of just downloading a “cracked” copy of commercially licensed software, however, is bad karma and it’s illegal. The association that polices this sort of thing is BSA | The Software Alliance, and many are the horror stories of them auditing company computers just to find that the 70+ employees are all working on a single copy of PowerPoint or similar. And it’s not pretty, they have the right to not just bill the company for all the required licenses to get into compliance, but to impose penalties too.
So I encourage you to take a few minutes now to go through the major software programs you have on your computer and use regularly. Are they licensed? Are they the appropriate license for your situation (student versions for a commercial business aren’t cool either)? If not, why not help pay the salary of some hard working coder and pony up for the system and site licenses required?
If you’re suspicious that your company is doing the wrong thing and ripping off companies when it comes to licensing and they won’t do anything about it, you might consider report unlicensed software use to the BSA. It’s confidential and you can score cash rewards too. Not sure you want to take that step? No worries, just go and check out the informative articles available on NoPiracy.org and make up your own mind about how to proceed.
Now do the right thing.
